Faculty Views
By Samuel Bagenstos
On Class-Not-Race Throughout the civil rights era, strong voices have argued that policy interventions should focus on class or socioeconomic status, not race. At times, this position-taking has seemed merely tactical, opportunistic, or in bad faith. Many who have opposed racebased civil rights interventions on this basis have not turned around to support robust efforts to reduce class-based or socioeconomic inequality. That sort of opportunism is interesting and important for understanding policy debates in civil rights, but it is not my focus here. I am more interested in the people who clearly mean it. For example, President Lyndon Baines Johnson— who can hardly be accused of failing to support robust racebased or class-based interventions—advised Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act that the race-neutral, class-based Great Society programs had to be counted on to eliminate race inequality from that point forward. Calls for class-not-race interventions are likely to grow stronger during the next few years. This, then, seems an opportune time to examine the class-not-race position that underlies them. Many of the reasons offered for the class-not-race position are essentially strategic. These arguments assert not that class-notrace is superior as a matter of principle or first-best policy, but that approaches that target class instead of race are more likely to succeed in the political or legal process than are approaches
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that focus directly on race. This is most apparent in the context of affirmative action. Many of the advocates of class-based affirmative action—particularly after the Supreme Court decisions making race-based affirmative action more difficult to defend—believe that targeting class rather than race will place the practice of affirmative action on stronger legal grounds. The legal-doctrinal argument is certainly a key talking point for some of the most prominent advocates of class-based affirmative action. Other strategic arguments for the class-not-race position are political rather than legal in nature. William Julius Wilson emphasizes many of these points in The Truly Disadvantaged (University of Chicago Press, 1987, 2012). Policies that aim overtly at protecting or advancing the interests of particular, disadvantaged racial groups may be especially vulnerable politically. As Wilson makes explicit, these arguments tie rather directly to arguments among social policy experts regarding targeted versus universal social-welfare policies. Many experts argue that social-welfare policies are more politically durable when they are framed in universal terms. Means-tested programs like welfare (or, perhaps now, food stamps) are understood to be more vulnerable than universal social insurance programs like Social Security. Universal programs are more easily understood in solidaristic terms, as a reciprocal covenant among all citizens. As a result, solidaristic and